An upstate couple in the second row at the Museum of Modern Art’s Titus 2 Theatre admitted to having fallen asleep, separately and “only for a little.” They needn’t have added the exculpation, for Satyajit Ray’s An Enemy of the People/Ganashatru is three minutes shorter but even more soporifically stage-bound than Steve McQueen’s long-shelved, barely distributed, embarrassingly earnest labor of love of the same story and title. From an earlier Arthur Miller television adaptation, that latter 1979 filming of giant Henrik Ibsen’s social-themed play, failed to impart life.

Why, ten years later, the famous Indian economist-art director-book illustrator-turned director should, as usual, attempt his own script and music with the drama, is of more interest than the result itself. The blame primarily falls on precarious health. In his early sixties, the director had been forced by the most severe of several heart attacks, to relinquish The Home of the World to filmmaker son Sandip and remain inactive for four years. On doctors’ orders, his return to work had to be limited to studio shooting, hence the unadventurous wordy nature of this sad second-from-last production before his death.

In a mix of traditional and Western clothing designed by Ray himself -- brother Nishit Gupta (Dhritiman Chatterjee) is criticized for his affected British ascot -- the actors sit around in easy chairs and talk the issues in Dr. Ashoke K. Gupta (Soumitra Chatterjee) and wife Maya’s (Ruma Guha Takurta) rented sitting room and the newspaper offices of editor Haridas Bagghi’s (Dipankar Dey) Janavarta/People’s Voice, or on telephones or, intercut here and there with pilgrims’ clay jars being filled with piped water (perhaps the same footage repeated), on a stage in a bare lecture hall. There are no transitions, no camera movement, not even any people walking and only a very few standing.

What we do have is a hundred minutes of debate, once in a while a brow rubbed to convey inner conflict, in subtitled Bengali with an occasional jarring phrase in English. These misplaced nineteenth-century dramatics lead to a silly deus-ex-machina resolution in which daughter Indrani’s (Mamata Shankar) intended, fledgling Moshal/Torch journalist Ronen Haldar (Vishwa Guha Takurta), and indignant ex-Janavarta assistant Biresh (Subhendu Chatterjee) miraculously gather an offscreen chorus of supporters to chant, “Long live Dr. Gupta!”

Goals and technique are sincere but so unembellished and melodramatic as to be cinematically painful. Both Norwegian playwright and Indian filmmaker take square aim at concerns as relevant today as in 1882: political and social hypocrisy, cronyism, bottom-line mentality, and, less overtly, the ignorance and pliability of the masses. Gadfly Ibsen placed his drama in a would-be spa on Norway’s south coast, and MoMA has chosen to include this rarely seen West Bengal cinema version among others based on writings by contemporaries of the subject of its successful Edvard Munch exhibition.

The Indian’s plot follows the Norwegian’s closely, though the character of his hero is weaker. Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann is naïve but with enough backbone to exclaim that “the strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.” Dr. Gupta is meant to be admirable but comes across as simpering. Since way before their marriage twenty years ago, Maya has seen through younger brother-in-law Nishit and his reasons, as three-term Chairman of the Municipality, for securing older Ashoke a comfortable hospital position. On his own initiative, the disinterested doctor investigates a rise in gastrointestinal complaints and deaths, the cause of which analysis traces to contaminated holy water at the temple on which Chandipur town pins its tourist-trade hopes. With mystical tulsi leaves, “holy water can never be polluted” is the response, and slow costly replacement of underground pipes in the densely populated area would hurt business and affect a nearby rice mill.

Moneyed and political interests conspire to squash any attempt to sound alarms about typhoid, cholera and jaundice. Indrani is pushed from her new teaching post, the doctor’s job and safety are threatened, and though his roving eye is at the moment fixed on Indrani, Haridas is pressured into pulling in his paper’s pseudo-liberal horns. The townspeople hoodwinked and manipulated into shouting down a public meeting set for 15 January, 1989, the hero who does not consider himself a hero is, instead, accused of anti-Hindu sentiments and about to be forced to leave.

Until the unconvincingly righted resolution, Ashoke has “lost, no more fight left in me.” “Is this a meeting, or a farce?” he whines. Disappointingly, the film is the latter, of interest for who made it though hardly for what his failing powers were able to make of it.

(Released by National Film Development Corporation of India; not rated by MPAA.)